Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (15 page)

A
FTER WE DROPPED
C
ASEY OFF
at her parents’ house, I was royally pissed. I was steaming because I couldn’t believe the cops were playing these stupid, unprofessional games. I went outside with Cindy and this time, in front of the cameras, I blasted the cops. I had a copy of my fax and explained, “These cops were so unprofessional. Look, I sent them a notice, and they lied to me point-blank.” I really ripped into them.

C
ASEY WAS OUT OF JAIL
for about a week when I got a call from Allen, who said, “We’re going to arrest your client again.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For two more bad checks,” he said.

“You knew she wrote four bad checks the last time you arrested her,” I said. “Why are you doing this again?”

“That’s beyond my control,” he said. “They decided to charge her with the other two checks she had written.”

All they wanted to do was ride her through the carousel again, but this time they allowed me to surrender her. Of course, the cameras were there again. And each time the police arrested her, they tried to talk to her without her lawyer—which was the true purpose of this futile exercise. They read her her rights and asked her, “Would you like to speak?” and again Casey did as instructed.

“No, I want my lawyer present,” she said.

We posted bond for a third time and brought her home again. That was it for the bad checks and the harassment.

R
IGHT AROUND THIS TIME
, Cindy and Casey were in my office when Cindy received a phone call from one of the cops.

“We need to speak to you right away,” he said.

“I’m in Jose Baez’s office,” she said. “If you want, you can come here.”

“We’ll go anywhere but there,” he said.

“No,” she said, “If you want to meet with me, you can meet me here.”

Two of them came to the office, along with a member of the FBI, and asked if they could speak with Cindy. I agreed. I let them use one of the other rooms, and that’s when they told Cindy that an expert who worked for the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility (also known as the “Body Farm”) in Knoxville, Tennessee, had tested the carpet taken from Casey’s Pontiac and determined that the chemicals released from the carpet were consistent with a “human decompositional event.”

Said one of the policemen, “They came back saying it was human decomposition, and we believe Caylee is dead.”

Cindy fell to her knees and wept. She was devastated, absolutely and completely devastated. She was so distraught she couldn’t get up. I helped bring her to the couch and sat her there. Everyone in the room—the police, the FBI agent, myself, all of my employees—just felt horrible.

Casey had been taken back to the house, so she hadn’t heard the news. Cindy lay on the couch in a fetal position, crying her eyes out, when she looked up at the police and asked, “Are you 100 percent certain that Caylee is dead?”

Nick Savage, an FBI agent, said to her, “Nothing is 100 percent certain.” And I could see the blood rush to Cindy’s face. She popped up almost instantly and said, “You mean to tell me you have the nerve to come here and stab my heart and take away my hope and tell me Caylee’s dead when you don’t know for sure?”

The cops started to stutter. They hadn’t expected that response from Cindy. She turned to them and began to yell, “How dare you? Who the hell do you think you are to come in here and say something like that when you don’t know for sure?”

It was as if she had risen from the dead and overpowered all of them. And it was at that moment that I felt a tremendous amount of respect for Cindy Anthony.

It turned out the reason the police were in such a hurry to tell her was because they had already leaked the results of the tests to the media. They didn’t want Cindy to find out from the media.

Again, I couldn’t get over their lack of professionalism. Their desire to try this case in the media overcame—inundated—their ability to conduct a proper investigation. And this was a perfect example of it. Here they had results from a highly novel type of test, in which they heated the carpet samples and studied the gasses that were released. It turned out the results were
very
preliminary (in the end they would reveal
no such thing
), but they released them because of their need to feed the media.

The media were a bigger priority than the investigation. Before knowing with certainty, the police were telling a grandmother her missing granddaughter was dead. In the end, it turned out to be true, but it doesn’t take away from the lack of professionalism and the ridiculous way the police conducted themselves.

Put the pieces together: the ruse in the jail, the revolving door of arresting her, the leaks to the media, and the manner they were leaking information. These guys might just as well have been the Keystone Kops, but at the same time, the media were painting them as Super Cops. This bears repeating:
As far as the police were concerned, the Casey Anthony case was a reality show that the media were scripting, and the reason the cops got a free pass to do whatever they wanted to do was that the cops were trying to make their reality show come true.

It was disgusting.

And that was just the beginning.

After Casey was freed, the craziness of the “Casey Anthony Reality Show” escalated. The cops, through the media, had declared that Casey was guilty of killing her two-year-old child, so once the public learned that she was out of jail, its outrage against her grew to the point where self-appointed crusaders demanding justice for Caylee began to camp out on the sidewalk in front of the Anthony home.

It started one day shortly after we had gotten Casey out when Ed Phlegar, one of my paralegals, came into my office and said, “The bloggers are saying they’re going to organize a protest in front of the Anthony home. They’re carpooling to bring in more people and asking those with vans and busses to volunteer their vehicles.”

“Don’t these people have jobs?” I asked Ed.

“Apparently not,” he said. “You should see what they’re doing.”

I hadn’t paid attention to bloggers before.

“You should take a look at this,” he said to me. “These people are out of control.”

I went online and started to read what these bloggers were saying and couldn’t believe the anger and hatred that was developing against Casey and me. I also couldn’t believe the number of armchair detectives out there who were trying to solve the case. There was a website called Websleuths, and in it they had gone through the public records and researched my entire career. The “sleuths” talked about me as though they knew me. Much of it was insulting, even cruel, and scary. The prosecution, through the media, was inciting these people to act out, and there was nothing that the Anthonys, Casey, or I could do about it.

Yuri Melich was even blogging—under the name Dick Tracy Orlando. I don’t know if a lead detective in a high-profile case was ever caught blogging before, but this was certainly the case. I had every intention of cross-examining him about this in front of the jury.

I wondered, not for the first or last time,
What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Apparently, in the age of social media, Casey’s constitutional rights were being thrown to the wolves.

Every night, around ten trucks with long antennae sat up and down Hopespring Drive. The Anthony home became Orlando’s second-most popular tourist attraction.

Some protesters brought signs. One day a woman brought her baby with her and had her hold up a sign that said, “Would you kill a baby like me?” Another lady brought her dog with a sign that said, “I would report my dog missing after 30 seconds, not 30 days.” It was despicable, but the cameras were there to film them, and they could watch themselves on the local news. The more that these people got on camera, the crazier it would get.

Cindy, who could never keep quiet, became a star of the reality show outside the Anthony home. Incapable of just ignoring them, she would go out and argue with the protesters while the cameras filmed the mayhem. People would yell all sorts of nasty things at her, and she would yell right back at them, trying to convince them that Caylee was still alive and that the nanny had her. One day she went out and hammered “No trespassing” signs on her lawn. The TV crews were filming her, and she began yelling at the media with the hammer in her hand, which the media loved, as millions looked on.

Another time a woman got into an argument with Cindy. The woman had brought her young son with her, and during their argument the woman called Casey a “bitch.” Cindy said to her, “If you call Casey a bitch again …” and in her anger the woman accidentally slammed her car door on her nine-year-old son. The little boy fell on the ground sobbing. His mother ignored him, more concerned with yelling at Cindy. They took the kid to the hospital. It made for some dramatic TV. The boy was fine, but this was some of the crazy shit that went on in front of the Anthony home.

One night protesters threw rocks at the Anthonys’ windows and began banging on their front door. That’s when the Anthonys started to lose it. Cindy came out of the house with a bat, and George pulled out a water hose and began spraying the protesters on the sidewalk. Five young adults—I hesitate to call them that—picked a fight with George, and they were pushing and shoving each other. From the living-room window, Casey saw the melee and called 9-1-1, a call that became big news. Leading the news that night was Casey’s voice on a 9-1-1 call.

Every night outside the Anthony home it was as festive as the Florida State Fair. From inside the house, you could hear the protesters screaming, “Baby killer! Baby killer!”

Finally, the neighbors started to get angry because the commotion and the noise were ruining their peace and quiet. The neighbors wanted the protesters to go away, and fights would break out.

The cops just stood there, doing nothing. Around the same time, the son-in-law of Sheriff Kevin Beary had been arrested for domestic violence. I remember his statement, “We ask that you respect our privacy,” and I thought,
Who’s respecting the privacy of the Anthonys?

If the protesters had been outside the sheriff’s home, you can be sure those people would have been thrown in jail in a heartbeat. But because this reality show in front of the Anthony home played into the public-relations plan of the prosecution—to poison the public’s attitude toward Casey—the cops just let it happen.

CHAPTER 6

THE GRAND JURY INDICTS

I
WAS SURE THE PROSECUTION was going to indict Casey for murder at some point. The prosecution’s case was forming, and since every shred of evidence against Casey was being heralded in the media, I knew exactly what they would be presenting before a grand jury.

I knew they would parade Detective Yuri Melich in front of a grand jury to testify that Casey was lying through her teeth about her and Caylee’s whereabouts, but they had no idea
why
she was lying, and quite frankly, it seemed to me that they really didn’t care. Her story on its face was very odd. For two years she had talked of Zanny [Fernandez-Gonzalez], the nanny, a woman no one ever saw and who obviously never existed. She told everyone she worked a job when she didn’t. Like clockwork, for two years, five days a week, Casey would get up, get herself and Caylee dressed, go to a job that didn’t exist and drop her child off at a nanny’s house that did not exist. And not a soul noticed. Clearly she was masking her web of deep, dark secrets that she was too afraid to reveal.